Nightingale February Dev Update Prepares for Early Access and Fixes and Improvements Set for Launch

mmorpg.com:

The Nightingale team is prepping for the game’s big launch into Early Access next week. Not only did Inflexion Games move the start up by two days to February 20th, they’re highlighting the recent stress test, what they’ve learned from community feedback, and more.

The earlier time not only lets everyone jump in on Tuesday instead of Thursday, but it gives the team a chance to prepare for Nightingale's first weekend, when demand will almost certainly be highest. With nearly 50,000 people logging into a stress test, this makes a lot of sense.

The stress test held on February 2nd was only supposed to last for about three hours, but after nearly 50,000 showed interest and were able to join the test, it was extended into the evening. A big reason was that, even with that demand, the servers kept up. There were issues, including late invite emails from Steam that were delayed by up to right hours, disappointing some who had been looking forward to testing Nightingale. 

That test also gave Inflexion lots of data and on the other side of those nine hours, some important community feedback. The team promises that they will address feedback regarding the UI and UX that came in. Some potential changes to address these issues include adding the ability to drag and drop items onto your hotbar and also show status effects differently when they're not active. There are several features that were left out of the stress test build, like keybinds, that will make it on day one. 

The video goes into a lot of detail about what the team is working on and what they learned from the stress test, including crashes and bugs, in addition to AI issues, some visual bugs, and more like hail, overly aggressive enemies, and other concerns. As far as visual performance, they also remind everyone that NVidia GeForce NOW support is available, as well as the recommended specs.

Some of what else we should know before the game launches is that you can play solo or you can play it with up to six players